Customer case

Axel Springer SE is one of Europe's largest media companies, with numerous multimedia news
brands, such as BILD, WELT, RollingStone, StepStone, Upday, and FAKT.
They have nearly 16,000 employees, achieved total revenues of about € 3,6 billion and an EBITDA
of € 646 million in the financial year 2017.

A big media company such as Axel Springer is always facing fierce competition and challenging demands from its customers. Therefore - the company has
deployed lots of initiatives to drive the digital transformation. As an example of this investment in new technology, we can relate a success story from the
Legal Department. The Legal Department provides legal services and advice to all group companies and subsidiaries across several countries. They are also
responsible for corporate governance.

The need for a new solution

The Legal Department exists of around 50 employees of which approximately 30 are in-house lawyers. They were struggling with high total legal costs and
bottlenecks to serve the business. They had a need for working more efficiently and started to look for some digital solutions to help them with a digital
transformation allowing the business to create their own legal contracts in a self-service portal.

"Axel Springer wanted to standardize the way we worked with contracts across the organization and free up time for the legal team for more complex
matters," Dr. Konrad Wartenberg, Group General Counsel at Axel Springer, says.

"We had to find a solution that was easy to use for the non-lawyers in the organization so they could create their own standard contracts without having
to stand in line for in-house lawyers or external lawyers," Dr. Susanne Stollhoff, Senior General Counsel, Head of Digital and Data Law, says.

From the decision to implementation

The legal team looked at some other solutions before choosing Pactumize but no other tool was really designed for the non-lawyers. Also, looking at the
investment no other solution could match the price/performance and also deliver the user-friendliness so it could be rolled out across the organization. The
IT department was also involved and wanted to make sure it was a secure cloud solution that was chosen and that Pactumize would handle all data in a safe
and secure manner.
After the decision was made it didn't take long for the first contracts to be configured so they could be used by the business users and start testing the
solution.

"Another important factor in our digital transformation has been working closely with the Pactumize team. They have been very responsive to our requests
and always delivered what they have promised," Susanne Griem, M. A., Assistant Digital & Data Law, who has coordinated all the work with the
Pactumize team, says.

The results

Pactumize has increased efficiency and speeds up the business with the help of Contract Automation. The contracts used are the ones that the Legal Department
has decided for. This ensures compliance with all clauses that the business can use as they are pre-approved by the legal team. It also helps to handle
peaks with new regulatory changes like GDPR for example. Suddenly there was a need to roll out new contracts to several parts of the business and they
created hundreds of new contracts themselves every month without taking time from the legal team.

"We now recommend all business users to use the Pactumize solution instead of calling a lawyer in the legal department. It saves us a lot of time that the
non-lawyers can create their own contracts and we can focus our time on supporting the business in more complex matters," Dr. Stollhoff continues.

We wish the legal team at Axel Springer good luck on their ongoing voyage to innovate, digitalize and continually improve legal operations and will support
them by doing our part constantly improving our solution.